I didn’t deny the wrong and brutal methods of the Soviets, and I didn’t deny them. But you missed completly the point, so I don’t really know what to reply.
I had a Lithuanian and a Polish coworker who talked to one another in Russian a lot, though they both spoke English as well.
Sounds as if you are close to my age group - I was finishing High School when the Berlin Wall fell.
Well, I didn’t know detailed history of all Eastern bloc countries, either, because I don’t have a memory for details. But we certainly did discuss their history in school, and in 10th grade German class we did read Russian authors (we could choose between the four big authors, I picked Dostoyewski).
Hijack, but oh well:
In the days of the Soviet Union, an elderly Jew is sitting on a park bench reading the Torah. A KGB officer comes up to him and asks him what language that is that he is reading.
“This is Hebrew, the language of my people. I am old and full of years, and soon expect to meet God and Abraham in Paradise. I am relearning my Hebrew because that is the language they speak there.”
The KGB officer replies “But what if you wind up going to the other place, comrade?”
“Oh, well, I already know Russian.”
My friend S has an adopted daughter who grew up in Soviet-era Lithuania. They had to study Russian in school and she says their native language and customs were repressed; she laments that she almost speaks better Russian than Lithuanian. This would’ve been in the '70s-'80s.
It was much the same in '80s Latvia, according to my Latvian ex.
I think the point was that brutality, repression, censorship, slavery, persecution, and other nasty things didn’t begin with the Soviets; they had been going on in Imperial Russia long before. The distinction between “cultured” Russians and “brutish” Soviets has no basis in fact.
My mother was a teenager in communist Hungary, and she was required to take Russian in high school. I don’t think she remembers any of it today.
In Estonia a few years ago I was slightly surprised to hear that out host (too young to have been adult in the Soviet era) didn’t speak Russian, and didn’t have any wish to, either. About a third of the population is ethnic Russian (or Ukrainian), transplanted there in the post-war period. Estonians don’t like them much.
constanze firrst of all, in the US “Russian” and “Soviet” were virtually synonymous until the fall of the USSR. “Soviet” was only a word you would hear on the news; Russians, or maybe “Commies” were your every day words for residents of the USSR. If you are asking if Americans from the 60s-80s were raised in shameful ignorance of slavic geography and politics, the answer is “absolutely yes.”
In the US there was very strong propoganda that “the Russians” were a faceless, and very evil hegemony. In our popular culture they lacked not only morals, but any common sense motivation for their acts. They were just as likely to spontaneously invade Colorado as hit the big red button. They were basically protrayed as a species of evil robots (unless they were defectors, like Baryshnikov). So much so that in the 80s there was a rash of feel-good songs that basically said “OMG, Russians are human!” such as “Russians” by Sting, and “Leningrad” by Billy Joel.
Which is not to say that every American was equally ignorant or subscribed wholsale to these beliefs. But it would not be surprising at all if a small child did.
oops, back to the OP – I was in Bulgaria on a university program in 1996. Bulgarians actually hated the Soviets considerably less than other slavic states, as they kicked out the Turks, whom the Bulgarians doubleplus hated. And Bulgarian uses the Cyrillic alphabet and has many words in common with Russian.
Even so, by 1996 only the older generation spoke Russian. People my age spoke English; some of them had mandatory Russian in grade school before the fall, but they either never really spoke it, or instantly forgot it after it ceased to be mandatory.
This. (Although “Commies” wasn’t used so much in where I grew up.)
I was one of those a-holes who, when someone said, “Russia announced that blah blah blah,” would reply, “You mean the Soviet Union.” It was akin to correcting someone for saying “Holland” instead of “The Netherlands.” No one really cared, and everyone thought you were annoying.
Wish I could say I’ve changed.
nm
Don’t forget that you grew up in Germany, smack in the middle of Europe.
As a kid growing up in Michigan, USA, I was so isolated from things across the ocean, our studies were more US-centric. In fact, I never studied world history in high school—the classes were available, but I disliked history and did not pursue it.
When I went to Navy boot camp in 1985, I remember how everything bad was referred to as “commie” this and that (e.g. in inspection, the inspector might spot a tag sticking out from some guy’s undershirt and yell at him for having a “commie tag” on his T-shirt).
I remember the songs we sang as we marched were often punctuated with “Your left, your LEFT… your Left, Right, Left… your Commie Stompin’ Left… blah blah blah”
And yes, I remember as a child hearing about the “Russians” as if they were the boogymen with fingers poised over the Big Red Button.
I really did not understand any distinctions regarding political divisions in the USSR and Eastern Europe until many years later.
This can be called ignorance, but should not be sneered at and looked down on without considering that for many Americans, that’s what childhood was like.
While Albania is still pretty poor and messed up, it is not a hellhole. It’s very pretty and the people are extremely friendly and welcoming. I highly recommend it as a travel destination for a somewhat more adventurous traveler! (BTW, they love Americans in Albania.)
Under communism, I believe all Bulgarians studied Russian and then maybe German - before I could speak very good Bulgarian, people constantly asked me if I spoke Russian or German. (One guy, after finding out that I spoke neither, asked me in astonishment, “You only speak English?!” like there were only four languages in the entire world.)
But Russian has always been a foreign language in Bulgaria. It wasn’t spoken in any kind of official capacity - Bulgarians are very proud of their language and alphabet and May 24 is the National Day of the Bulgarian Alphabet. A huge percentage of schools in the country are named after Saints Kyril and Metodi, who invented the Cyrillic alphabet, and whom Bulgarians claim as their own. (Which only makes sense if you understand a little bit about Slavic ethnicity and the Balkans, but okay.)
Bulgarians still really like the Russians, who rescued them from occupiers twice - the Ottomans in the 1880s and the Nazis after WWII. At my school in Bulgaria - this was 2006-2008 - the three languages taught were English (by me), Russian, and German. Russian has a bit of a reputation for being the “easy” language, because it’s fairly similar to Bulgarian and is written in the same alphabet, but English was the most popular. Unfortunately, because this is a recent development, not a lot of Bulgarians actually speak English, so the pool of potential teachers is quite small, and I have met Bulgarian teachers of English who literally cannot communicate in English at all.
A good friend of mine is Albanian-American, and although she’s too young to have gone to school much under the old system (plus, she immigrated to the US when she was just a kid), and I’m sure she would be able to tell me whether her parents took Russian as kids, if you’re really interested.
From my own experience:
- The curriculum was structured in such a way that (ideally) every student would have acquired two “International auxiliary languages” by the time they completed their secondary (compulsory) education. The first language was usually introduced in elementary school and the second during the secondary cycle.
It was implied that the school’s administration will organize things in such a way that one of these languages will be Russian. A common scheme was to have half the second grade classes take (say) Russian while the other half would take English, French, or German (much less frequently Italian or Portuguese). Come fifth grade those taking Russian would add one of the other languages and the others would start taking Russian classes.
By and large the system did work, but it has to be said that as a rule everyone hated everything related to Russia - including, of course, the language. Therefore, usually one of the two happened: either they tried to sneak out of this “program” by getting themselves transferred to classes that had other languages in their curriculum, either they resisted it passively, feigning an incapacity to learn a foreign language. (Well, more often than not it was true, anyway).
Experience where, ruritanian, if I may ask?
The Russians surely grew up speaking Russian, and the Ukrainian (if he’s old enough) probably did too, because the Ukraine was part of the USSR. Depending on when and where (especially given that “when” is post-Stalinism), the school may have operated entirely in Russian. In other times and places, Russian would have been a second language.
Albania and Czechoslovakia were under Soviet influence, to be sure, but they weren’t part of the USSR, and people there grew up speaking their own languages. I’m guessing that most of them were strongly encouraged to take Russian as a second language, but how well that works out has been commented on already.
But both were part of Russia at the time, not independant countries
Neither was part of Russia. Lithuania, Latvia and Russia were three of the republics of the Soviet Union.
I’m not sure about what the OP means by ‘Soviet Bloc’; there was the Soviet Union and the communist bloc, which were not the same thing (IIRC, China was seen as part of the communist bloc for some time, and obviously they weren’t taking Russian classes 
).
Now, AFAIK Russian language was rather mandatory in the former Soviet Union. My personal experience is limited to the former Soviet Republic of Moldova; the wiki page gives only the number of native language speakers for each language currently spoken in Moldova, but in my experience at least half of the populace is bilingual romanian-russian. Russian was the official language in the former Soviet Union, in the sense that official documents, education, TV and radio stations were in Russian (I don’t know about the official status of native languages in the former soviet republics).
As for the other countries in the communist bloc (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania) , Russian was just a foreign language. It was taught in school as any other foreign language; for instance, I started taking french classes in the 5th grade (2 hours/week) and russian classes in the 6th grade (1 hour/week) (this was in communist Romania in the 80’s).
Probably it was much easier for Polish, Czechs and Bulgarians to learn it, but it was still a foreign language in their countries.
Not to mention that the communist regimes tended to be quite nationalistic (some of them rabidly so), putting a strong emphasis on national history and traditions (or creating a national mythology for propaganda purposes).
OK, sorry, I misspoke 
. I meant Soviet Union.